The Eternal Jew and Counter-History in Gustav Landauer’s Lecture on Strindberg’s Historical Miniatures

Abstract

This essay explores Gustav Landauer’s conception of the universal, redemptive role of Judaism in human history. Drawing primarily on his lectures on August Strindberg’s Historical Miniatures, which subsequently appeared in print in the periodical Der Jude in 1917, it construes how Landauer, as a fin-de-siècle German Jewish writer, translator, political thinker, and anarchist revolutionary, constructs the character of the Wandering Jew (der ewige Jude) as the embodiment of the secret of human history. This essay examines the literary critical strategies by which Landauer fashions the biblical Abraham as a generic character, fusing him with the Wandering Jew into a perpetual motif, a point of origin, and a source of inherent human knowledge of the Eternal in various guises throughout history. Embodied in the figure of the Abrahamic Wandering Jew, this essay shows, is Landauer’s mystical-anarchic notion of the redemption of humanity through universal community and Judaism’s eternal task therein. Ultimately, it suggests that in Landauer’s utopian worldview, it is poetry, the aesthetic form to which he ascribes Strindberg’s work, that most adequately manifests Judaism’s counter-historical role.